


his eyes as clear as centuries

by gisho



Category: Watchmen
Genre: Magical Realism, Speculative Future-Fic, very weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-08
Updated: 2016-06-08
Packaged: 2018-07-13 00:41:42
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7131101
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gisho/pseuds/gisho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>As more years pass on than Adrian Veidt ever expected to see, he contemplates the long-term consequences of his plans.</p>
            </blockquote>





	his eyes as clear as centuries

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for a kinkmeme prompt: "Adrian achieves immortality, and as the centuries march on he finds it's everything he deserves." Title is from the Paul Simon song "Born At The Right Time".

Veidt notices around the turn of the millennium. _Millennium_ , just like his cosmetics line, an arbitrary turning point but one that humans have made meaningful, as they have so many other turning points.

There are a series of little tells. His hair, still blond through and through. His eyes, not edged with wrinkles. His muscles, not straining from years of hard use and wear. Veidt wonders if it was a side-effect of spending so much time near Jon, if Laurie, too, is experiencing eternal youth. _The world's best cosmetic_ , he thinks, and laughs to himself. His secretary doesn't ask why.

A few years later she helps him fake his own death, and doesn't ask why. She's smart enough. Maybe she doesn't have to.

\--

A ceremony marks the decommissioning of the last nuclear warhead on Earth. The American president and the premier of the USSR, in protective suits, swing a massive sledgehammer together to destroy its electronic brain. Then they embrace.

On the outskirts of the crowd a blond man with a press pass tightens his fists until his knuckles go white.

\--

By 2050, the Energy Crisis is something mentioned in textbooks, if at all. People laugh and tell their grandkids about the years when you had to _pay_ for _gasoline_ to run your car.

In Singapore a man calling himself Pierre spends his days in cafes, talking to students and old people with free time, smiling at everyone and encouraging some of them to go into politics.

\--

Two months after the official foundation of a permanent colony on Mars, war breaks out in China. Everyone is surprised. There had been no war in twenty years. Not even in the powder-keg of Africa, which had turned out to be so much less explosive once the desalination plants started working. The governments of Europe, who have learned their hard, bloody lessons, grit their teeth and do nothing, because there is nothing they can do.

Tibet does not turn down private volunteers, though, and when a muscular blond man turns out to have an amazing grasp of tactics, they try to promote him. He sets his mouth in a thin, hard line, and says he does not like war, and this is not his war, and then, laughing, he accepts.

China finally recognizes Tibet's independence a year and a month after their last soldiers are chased out.

\--

The famine in India was pretty much inevitable. People talk about vertical farming and the advantages of hydroponics, but nobody's gotten the technique down, and all the technology in the world can't compensate for drought, not when there are so many people straining the earth's capacity.

Under the pressure of popular unrest, the American government sends food aid. They are upbraided for not sending enough, but publication of a number of reports, stolen from an FDA secure server and sent to major news outlets by someone signing themselves "a concerned citizen", reveals that they had pressured farming concerns to donate more grain than they had, that beef cattle are starving to death for lack of the grain America sent to India. Perhaps, pundits say, there just isn't enough food. Perhaps we have to start exploring alternative solutions.

In New York, a man with the kind of money a hundred years of compound interest can provide and an impressive array of cracking programs watches the 'grams of hollow-cheeked children on the news, digs his fingers into the hollows of his hips and breathes in even cadences, finally gives up on sleep and gets up. He makes oatmeal, and forces himself to eat every bite.

\--

It's Israel, people say in 2140, and shake their heads. When was there ever peace in Israel?

Before 1945, says the second-string arts columnist for the Rio Express Daily, an immigrant who stands out for his pale skin and purple hair. He gets in an argument with his boss, although he never raises his voice. Two weeks later he's packed and gone, leaving no forwarding address.

\--

The Martians like to think they're above it all. They're very proud of their tolerance, their community spirit, their scientific approach. Their artistic spirit. A poet calling himself Aron makes friends by flash-message with the East Martian secretary of the arts, and impresses her with his heartfelt word-paintings of the red Martian landscape. He also speaks at length, and eloquently, of the need to develop a common Martian language. Otherwise, he tells her, your people will remember in extremis that they were once American and Chinese and Indian and Brazilian and Batswana, and they will crack on the old, obsolete lines.

She wonders if he's imagining things, or if he knows something she doesn't.

She pushes for it anyway.

\--

By the time of the second Great Indian Famine, America has no grain-fed cattle left to let starve.

\--

Nobody alive in 2197 thinks of Dr. Manhattan as anything but a boogeyman, but there are people who mutter. America had such a better standard of living then, they say. We had more food. More luxury. More empty space. We didn't live packed together in efficiencies. Maybe he wasn't so bad.

A man with long white hair sips cheap mint tea, the drink of the working poor (and who now isn't working poor?), in an underground cafe, and writes endlessly on his mobile. He flirts with the waiter, and tells him about why the standard of living has really gone downhill.

\--

By 2250, the old idealist guarantees of freedom of movement are starting to be set aside. In the face, governments say, of the intense population pressure.

India's birth-licensing laws violate a lot of human rights agreements. The agreements are from the early 21st century, however, and there's a lot of throat-clearing and talk of renegotiation.

\--

There's a certain sick irony in it, to the thin man devouring his guaranteed citizen’s ration in Canada, that if Ukraine had not asked for independence - and gotten it, without a war - they would not have faced a war now. But even in 2303 the USSR is something to fear; their reputation has outlived their strength. Nobody is afraid of Ukraine. Maybe that was what inspired Turkey to sail across the Black Sea with the biggest guns they had left.

Turkey still has a fertile coast. Turkey isn't as bad as it gets.

The thin man sits up all night looking at maps and charts of energy plants, desalination plants, manufacturing centers, and then at charts of soil quality and sea oxygenation level, and then at a map of Antarctica, but Antarctica is much smaller than it looks on the standard projections and that much ice, dumped into the sea, would drown more land than it left bare.

\--

"Collapse is inevitable," say the scholarly papers. "We have outstripped the Earth's capacity."

"Things are not so bad," say the other scholarly papers. "We have technology, we have vertical farms and all the energy we could want, we have the ingenuity of fifteen billion people to apply to the problem."

To most of the fifteen billion, the point is academic.

\--  
  
The Earth Government has been pressuring the Martian government to increase immigration quotas for years and years. A thin man whose passport says 'Efesa' sits in Union Station in Tokyo, listens to the pounding of a million feet and reads the news on his late-model mobile. Europe's president gave a passionate speech yesterday. "Are we not your people?" she said. "Remember, you were European once, and American and African and Asian. The people of Earth need you. What right do you have to deny new colonists the chance of happiness in a new home, when you had it yourselves?"

"We are Martians," the Martian Minister of Sustainability answered. "We have our own language, our own customs, and we are not going to repeat your mistakes."

\--

He hasn't gotten sick since 1972.

He doesn't get sick in 2374.

\--

In 2376, he leaves the Earth for the first time, as a permanent immigrant to Mars. As a natural non-carrier, Mars is happy to welcome him. The populations are much closer now. Earth is actually begging for people back, agriculturalists and biologists, now they have all the farmland they could want.

"Something had to give," is what he types madly on his mobile as the shuttle pulls away from the Moon. He plans to submit the article a little compilation run by a teenager from Antarctica. It has an audience of a quarter-million or so. Small, but thoughtful. "If there is a lesson to be learned from the tragedy of the Pandemic, it is that humans never know when to stop. We did not give up nuclear weapons until Dr. Manhattan's attacks gave us all something greater to fear. That was four hundred years ago, and it seems as remote now as the Thirty Years War must have seemed in the early Space Age, but we have not forgotten; no state since has developed nuclear weapons, and if the attacks did not end wars, they left the superpowers too terrified to participate. But they did not end the reasons for war. They only bought a breathing space. Compared the Pandemic, they bought it cheap." For him to write such a thing seems arrogant in the extreme; only the certainty of its truth keeps his finger from the delete button.

"We have gotten the harshest reminder possible that the world is a fragile place, and that we should tread on it lightly. Let us remember this. We have tried to cast aside statehood, ethnic conflict, even religion. We cannot cast aside our empty stomachs. There's enough for everyone now, and all we had to pay was fifteen billion lives, lives for the most part of people who lived so close together they never had a moment's true privacy, who shared everything they had because there was never enough. They should not have died. But neither should they have had to live like that."

It should be an obvious opinion, but few people are willing to give it voice.

"The Manhattan attacks hauled humanity from the brink of nuclear destruction, and humanity never returned. The Pandemic, horrible as the thought is, hauled us from the brink of starvation. Let us be sure never to return."

The Earth spins blue and green out his window, and from here you can't see the graves at all. _We will all go together when we go,_ the old song went. Would it have been more merciful that way? No, he decides, and abruptly snaps his mobile shut, gets up to find the bar. No. Better to live, whatever the price. Every human on earth was a casualty, but half a billion humans are still alive enough to rebuild. Replant.

\--

A man with blue eyes gives his name to Immigration Control as Lechi Vechesa. He finds a place to stay without difficulty, on the outskirts of the settled region in a new-grown dome, and hires on as a hydroponic tech. Two years later he runs into Laurie.

She calls herself Sil Metis now, and her hair is blond and she still has the mole on her cheek. She's a little surprised to see him, asks if he was hunting her down. She says it with an achingly familiar smile.

They go hiking together, to talk privately, following the water pipe down from the polar icecap to Libertyville. "It's not an improvement," she mutters as they look it over, and refuses to elaborate. Instead she asks about his life. He admits to fighting in one war, casting influence everywhere, to having argued for the creation of the Martian language. To spending 2374 on the streets handing out water bottles, because there was nothing else left to do. She has the grace not to say anything.

Their footsteps trail behind them in the dirt, and her face turns red at the edges of her oxygen mask. After all this time, they still can't make a mask that doesn't rub uncomfortably on the face.

"I thought I'd never see anything worse than what you did," she tells him. "'74, I was on Mars already. The news kept going black and I still didn't see it. Does that count as a joke?"

If so, it's the Comedian's kind of joke. He doesn't point that out, either.

"Maybe someday we'll finally manage to wipe ourselves out," she says, and laughs. He doesn't laugh, but he smiles, and smiles. He'll be there to watch it, if they do. He smiles at the red sands of Mars, and he is already too tired to despair.

\---


End file.
